Energy Pie Chart Example: The U.S. Electricity Mix by Source

This example charts where U.S. electricity came from in 2023, using approximate shares of utility-scale generation from the Energy Information Administration. It is a chart that rewards careful reading, because the popular narrative about energy and the actual proportions disagree in places.

What the chart shows

Natural gas is the headline: 43 percent, approaching half the circle, and more than the next two sources combined. Whatever one’s expectations about the American grid, the chart states its present tense plainly: it runs primarily on gas. Coal, which led generation for most of a century, sits at 16 percent, now third behind nuclear.

Nuclear at 19 percent is the slice most readers underestimate. From a fleet of reactors mostly built decades ago, it quietly generates nearly a fifth of the country’s electricity, and since it emits no carbon in operation, it remains the largest single source of low-carbon power on this chart, ahead of wind, hydro, and solar individually.

The renewables read best as a group: wind at 10 percent, hydropower at 6, solar at 4, together 20 percent of the circle. Two details inside that group matter. Hydro, the old renewable, is largely maxed out, its dams long since built. And solar’s thin slice is the chart’s famous trap: this is a photograph of stock, not a video of trends. Solar was the fastest-growing source on the grid; the pie shows where it stands, not where it is heading. A slice’s size and a slice’s momentum are different facts, and only one of them fits in a pie.

Design choices in this chart

Sources are ordered by size, and the forest palette assigns its deeper greens down the ranking, keeping seven slices distinguishable without neon. Seven is at the top of the readable range, which is why minor sources, petroleum, biomass, geothermal, are gathered into a 2 percent Other rather than rendered as slivers.

Percentage labels are non-negotiable on a chart like this, since public-data audiences check figures against their priors. Equally non-negotiable is the source line: the numbers approximate EIA data for 2023, and saying so, including the year, is what separates a chart from a claim. Energy shares move annually; an undated energy pie is quietly wrong within a year.

Recreating it with current data

EIA publishes generation shares openly, and its tables export cleanly. Grab the latest annual figures, load the U.S. Electricity Mix template, and overwrite the seven values; the labels recompute and re-round to a clean 100. Update the year in the title and source line.

This chart is also a strong school and coursework subject: the data is real, public, and argued about. A useful exercise is making two versions, this year and a decade ago, side by side with identical colors. Watching coal’s slice halve while gas and renewables absorb it turns a policy story into geometry, which is what a good pie chart is for.